Register-Mihalik and her
team cited two culprits:
high pitch counts and
pitching too often.

are not fully developed,” Register-Mihalik said. Yet
her surveys revealed
that not many Little
Leaguers throw sliders. And kids who don’t throw curveballs or
sliders still get hurt. Some even develop ten-donitis.

Register-Mihalik’s team found twomain culprits: high pitch counts and pitch-ing too often. A pitch count is the maxi-mum number of pitches a player is allowedto throw in a game. “Whenwe first started our study,pitch counts weren’tmandatory in Little LeagueBaseball,” she said. “Abouthalf the leagues used pitchcounts and half didn’t. Wefound that pitchers inleagues with pitch countswere at a much lower risk ofgetting injured.” About 50percent lower.

Since the researchers released
their findings, Little League Baseball has put the report to good use,
showing it to coaches and parents to
back up the organization’s decision to
make pitch counts mandatory.

LITTLE LEAGUE BASEBALL, INC.

Still, there’s only so much one organization or league can do.

Some kids play on two teams at the same
time — a traditional summer league team,
for instance, and a travel team. One league’s
rules don’t apply to the other league. Also,
the best youth players often participate in fall
travel leagues and attend special baseball
tournaments called showcases where college
coaches and professional scouts look for
future players. The surveys that Register-Mihalik’s team used show that Little Leaguers and high schoolers who pitched on
travel teams or in showcases were at a much
greater risk of getting injured.

The researchers also found that comparedto Little Leaguers, high school pitchers wereat double the risk of developing arm prob-lems. And college pitchersfaced twice the risk asthat of high school play-ers. Sixty percent of col-lege pitchers reported tak-ing pain relievers to pitchthrough elbow or shoulder pain. More than
80 percent of college pitchers reportedpitching when their arms were tired. All thisis despite the fact that college coaches havemuch tighter control than high school andLittle League coaches over what their pitch-ers do at the gym, on the practice field, dur-ing games and in the off-season.

For more information,call 866-851-4661ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIMEEXPERIENCES.OFFERED DAILY.

Asheville, NC

The five-year study was developed and
implemented by Fred Mueller ’ 61, the director
of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport
Injury Research at UNC; Stephen Marshall
’ 98 (PhD), a professor of epidemiology in the
UNC Gillings School of Global Public
Health; and Barry Goldberg, the former director of sports medicine at Yale University.